Update on Shell Scripting Recipes book

Wow, it’s been nearly two months since I last made a post about the upcoming book on shell scripting. I’m really sorry, I had intended to give much more real-time updates here. The book focusses on GNU/Linux and the Bash shell in particular, but it does cover the other environments too – Solaris, Bourne Shell, as well as mentions for ksh, zsh, *BSD and the rest of the Unix family.

In terms of page count, it is currently 89% finished. There is still the proof-reading to be done, and whatever delivery details the publishers need to deal with, so the availability date of some time in August is still on schedule. I notice that http://amzn.com/1118024486 is already offering a massive discount on the cover price; I have no idea what that is about, I’m trying not to take offence – they can’t have dismissed the book already as I have not quite finished writing it yet! So hopefully you can get a bargain while it’s cheap.

The subject matter has the potential to be quite boring if presented as a list of tedious system administration tasks, so I have tried to make it light and fun whenever I can; it’s still with Legal at the moment, but I hope to have a Space Invaders clone written entirely in the shell published in the book. People don’t tend to see the Shell as being capable of doing anything interactive at all, so it is nice to write a playable interactive game in the shell. The main problem in terms of playability is in working out how much to slow it down, and at what stage! Of course, being a shell script, you can tweak the starting value, the level at which it speeds up, and anything else about the gameplay. If the game doesn’t make it in to the book, I’ll post it here anyway, and will welcome your contributions on gameplay.

Other than games, I’ve got recipes for init scripts, conditional execution, translating scripts into other (human) languages, even writing CGI scripts in the shell. There is coverage of arrays, functions, libraries, process control, wildcards and filename expansion, pipes and pipelines, exec and redirection of input and output; this book aims to cover pretty much all that you need to know about shell scripting without being a tedious list of what the bash shell can do.

There is a status page at http://sgpit.com/book which also has order information; you can pre-order your copy from there.

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Update: I’ve heard back from Legal, and it sounds like the Space Invaders recipe will make it into the book. I’m really pleased about that, as it is one of the things that points out that the shell isn’t just a plain black-and-white turn-based interaction with the system. I don’t expect loads of games to be written in the shell, and I doubt that Valve are quaking in their boots at the prospect, but it is really nice to show that the shell is not only quite capable of decent presentation, it can actually provide a reasonable interactive game.